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Austin Gunter is a Social Architect, Content Marketer and Community Builder for Startup companies, including being the Manager of Content & Community for WPEngine, a managed hosting platform for WordPress.

His role is to be the Community Face of the company, which means he has customer conversations from the “pre-sales” questions on social media channels, to developing relationships with customers long-term for potential biz dev opportunities. He travels and speaks at lots of conferences, and brings customer feedback to the product team.

Along the way, he has developed content marketing strategies. He analyzes and develops content and product narratives that can drive messaging on social media, online communities, and product marketing. He believes in developing trust online over time, and bending over backward to maintain the trust. He believes that the best marketing on the planet is the kind of marketing that finds out a potential customer’s real needs early and is willing to tell them they *shouldn’t* buy your product if they’re a bad fit.

Previously he spent time as a marketing consultant, a Product Manager for the likes of Dell and AMD. He turned down a job offer at Google after spending almost 2 years at a startup accelerator / incubator called Tech Ranch Austin. There he was responsible for bringing 120 tech startups into the program and helping them validate their ideas and grow. 10-15 of those companies are doing rather well, either funded and growing, or successfully bootstrapping and profitable.